When shopping for groceries, it’s easy to get confused by the different food product dates stamped on packaging. “Sell by,” “Best if used by,” “Use by,” and “Expiration” dates don’t all mean the same thing, and misunderstanding them can lead to throwing out perfectly good food—or worse, wasting money. By learning what these dates really mean, you can stretch your grocery budget and reduce food waste.

Importantly, food package dating is not federally regulated except in infant formula. 

Types of Packaging Dates

• Sell By Date: This is meant for the store, not the customer. It tells retailers how long to display the product for sale. Foods are usually still safe to eat for days (sometimes weeks) after this date if stored properly.

• Best If Used By/Before Date: This refers to quality, not safety. It’s the manufacturer’s estimate of when the product tastes its best. Many packaged foods—like cereal, pasta, and canned goods—are safe long past this date.

• Use By Date: This is the last date the manufacturer recommends for peak quality. It’s not necessarily a safety cutoff (except on infant formula, where it is federally regulated).

• Expiration Date: This is the closest thing to a real safety deadline. If you see “expires on,” it’s best not to consume the product after that point.

Tips for Saving Money and Reducing Waste

1. Shop Smart Around Dates: Grocery stores often discount items nearing their “sell by” or “best by” dates. Buying these and using or freezing them quickly can save you money.

2. Trust Your Senses: Look, smell, and taste (safely) before tossing something. Many foods are fine well beyond the printed date.

3. Use Your Freezer: Freezing meat, bread, and even dairy products before their date can extend shelf life for months.

4. Practice FIFO (First In, First Out): Rotate items in your pantry and fridge so older items are used first.

5. Know the Shelf Life: Canned goods, dried pasta, and rice can last for years if stored properly. Don’t rush to throw them away just because of a “best by” label.

Why It Matters

According to the USDA, Americans waste about 30–40% of the food supply each year, much of it due to confusion over date labels. That’s money out of your pocket and food out of the supply chain. By understanding packaging dates, you can save money, reduce waste, and make your groceries stretch further.

To learn more, check out this USDA resource https://www.fsis.usda.gov/food-safety/safe-food-handling-and-preparation/food-safety-basics/food-product-dating 

Find all of our UF-IFAS Blogs here https://blogs.ifas.ufl.edu/about/

This week, we talk about how 'Boring History' AI slop is taking over YouTube and making it harder to discover content that humans spend months researching, filming, and editing. Then we talk about how Meta has totally given up on content moderation. In the bonus segment, we discuss the 'AI Darwin Awards,' which is, uhh, celebrating the dumbest uses of AI.

Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube. Become a paid subscriber for access to this episode's bonus content and to power our journalism. If you become a paid subscriber, check your inbox for an email from our podcast host Transistor for a link to the subscribers-only version! You can also add that subscribers feed to your podcast app of choice and never miss an episode that way. The email should also contain the subscribers-only unlisted YouTube link for the extended video version too. It will also be in the show notes in your podcast player.

• AI Generated Boring History Videos Are Flooding YouTube And Drowning Out Real History
• Instagram Account Promotes Holocaust Denial T-Shirts To 400,000 Followers
• AI Darwin Awards Shows AI's Biggest Problem Is Human

In an oft-quoted speech, Winston Churchill said:

Never give in–never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.

The problem with this advice is that it means we spend an enormous amount of time in senseless battles with senseless folks who are also following this advice.

In a community, perhaps it makes more sense to only have battles about honour and good sense. In everything else, sure, give in. It’ll help you focus on what really matters.

      

Like everyone else, I’ve been following the latest Trump-Epstein revelations. Or maybe we should call them confirmations: Unless you were deep in the cult, you already had a pretty good idea of who Trump was and were aware that he and Epstein went way back.

But many Trump loyalists are cultists, sufficiently so that they believed that Donald Trump — Donald Trump! — was heroically defending the world against pedophiles. And we know what cultists do when confronted with facts that refute their beliefs: They engage in denial.

Now, Epstein and all that is — thank God! — not my department. But MAGA’s cultish nature is relevant to matters that are in my usual domain.

For Trump made many prophecies about the economic miracles he would achieve as president. “Starting on day one, we will end inflation,” he promised. “We will be slashing energy and electricity prices by half within 12 months, at a maximum 18 months.” He promised to get gasoline below $2 a gallon. And of course he insisted that he would deliver a jobs boom, especially in manufacturing.

Obviously none of that is happening. Tomorrow’s report on consumer prices will probably show inflation running at close to 3 percent, with most economists expecting it to rise in the months ahead. Electricity prices are rising rapidly, while gas is solidly above $3 a gallon. And job growth appears to be stalling.

Furthermore, much of the bad news is Trump’s own fault. His tariffs and deportations are both adding to inflation and, by creating uncertainty, slowing the economy.

But cultists never admit that their prophecies were wrong. Rather than admit that the promised economic miracle isn’t happening, Trump and his minions have gone after the people reporting the bad news, specifically the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which produces both jobs and inflation data.

Trump has already fired the head of the BLS for reporting job numbers he didn’t like, claiming falsely that the bad numbers were rigged to hurt him politically. We can expect further claims of partisan bias as the inflation numbers get worse, and eventually, probably quite soon, an attempt to purge and politicize the agency.

The push to politicize the BLS has been reinforced by yesterday’s report from the agency, which revised downward its estimates of past job growth. The White House claimed that it shows that “the BLS is broken.”

It showed no such thing. As a helpful post from the Economic Policy Institute says,

These BLS data revisions are not corrections of mistakes. Revisions are part of the regular, transparent process to update employment counts with the most comprehensive data possible.

As the EPI explains, monthly job numbers don’t literally track every job in America. They’re estimates based on a partial survey of employers. We only get comprehensive data from unemployment insurance tax records, which become available once a year. Revising the estimates based on that data is normal and in no sense a sign that the BLS is doing anything wrong.

But the administration will try to use the revision to discredit the agency, and in particular its recent reports showing a worsening labor market.

So what you need to know is that the BLS is doing its job the way it should, and that there is plenty of additional evidence confirming that the labor market has gotten worse under Trump.

For example, the widely respected Conference Board survey of consumers shows that between last December and August there was a sharp decline in the number of people saying jobs were “plentiful” and a sharp rise in those saying they were “hard to get.”

The New York Fed reports that the percentage of respondents who believe that they could quickly find a new job if they lost their current one has dropped sharply.

And the Federal Reserve’s Beige Book, a regular informal survey that often serves as a useful check on formal data, gave a clear picture of stalling employment:

Eleven Districts described little or no net change in overall employment levels, while one District described a modest decline. Seven Districts noted that firms were hesitant to hire workers because of weaker demand or uncertainty. Moreover, contacts in two Districts reported an increase in layoffs, while contacts in multiple Districts reported reducing headcounts through attrition …

This is not a booming economy.

It's not really surprising that Trump is failing to deliver on any of his promises, which never made sense in the first place. Nor is it surprising that he and those around him, rather than making a course correction, are trying to shoot the messengers. But it’s a tragedy that the attempt to suppress bad news may well destroy the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a highly competent and professional agency whose services we need more than ever.

MUSICAL CODA

I seem to have become CT’s resident moderate techno-optimist. So let me push back a little: here are five things that we’re not going to see between now and 2050.

1) Nobody is going to Mars. Let me refine that a little: nobody is going to Mars and coming back alive.  A one-way suicide mission is just barely plausible.


[spoiler:  he does get home]


“But Elon Musk says” okay you can stop right there.

“But 25 years is a long time! We did Apollo in just like 8 years!” Mars is harder than the Moon. Much, much harder.  Traveling to the Moon took three days. Traveling to Mars will take about two years round trip and will require a considerably larger spacecraft.  

NASA has been looking at Mars sample return for a while now — meaning, getting a basket of rocks and soil back from the Martian surface, so we can examine them in labs here on Earth. They quickly saw cost estimates balloon into the billions and backed off. Mars sample return is in suspended animation right now, and it’s certainly not going to happen before 2033 at the earliest. Getting humans to Mars and back alive?  would be much, much, much more difficult than that.

It would also require at least some level of in-situ resource utilization on Mars.  That means stuff like getting water out of Martian ice, for drinking water and possibly propellant.  Which is absolutely possible — I’m confident we’ll do it at some point — but we have barely started to think about this yet, and are at least a decade away from even piloting something to try it on a small scale.

Here’s a fun detail: until a few years ago, we didn’t realize that much of Mars’ surface is soaked in chlorates and perchlorates: basically the stuff you find in household bleach. Turns out the chemistry of Mars’ crust and surface is quite different from Earth’s! Also that any Mars travelers will have to deal with the perchlorates somehow. Is that the last potentially dangerous surprise Mars will have for us?  Probably not.

There are a bunch of unsolved technological problems with going to Mars, some of which we’re working on — we just made a modest breakthrough in zero-G electrolysis of water — some of which,   la la laaaa,  we are not. When I see those problems mostly solved, I’ll start to think we /might/ go to Mars. But I’m not holding my breath.

Note that various stakeholders have a vested interest in talking like we really are going to Mars, any day now!  NASA has historically been the worst offender here, because reasons, but there are several others.  So anything discussing Mars travel?  You want to look hard at who is writing it, and consider their motives.

2) Speaking of space woo, we are not going to see asteroid mining. Do I even have to go into this? Briefly: it’s really hard to reach an asteroid and bring anything back, and oh by the way nobody has yet found anything on an asteroid remotely worth bringing back to Earth.

I’m skeptical whether we’ll see meaningful use of asteroid resources in this century at all, but we certainly won’t see it by 2050.

— BTW, I’m actually a huge fan of space science.  I think we should be putting balloons in the atmosphere of Venus, deploying solar sails for trips to Mercury and the asteroids, and sending off another interstellar mission to replace the aging Voyagers.  A Pluto orbiter?  A Mercury lander?  Hell yes. Raise my taxes and drip that stuff right into my veins. 

But precisely because I take space exploration seriously, I sharply dislike space woo.  Manned trips to Mars are woo.

(Oh, and protip: if anyone starts talking about getting Helium-3 from the Moon, you can promptly discount anything they have to say about pretty much anything.  No, don’t thank me.  Public service.)

3) Coming down to Earth, we are not going to have commercial fusion power. We probably will have contained, continuous fusion reactions — I’m mildly optimistic on this, and won’t be shocked if it happens in the next 10 years. We might perhaps have a reaction that generates more electrical power than it consumes, though I’m less sure about that one.

But commercial fusion power? Meaning, even remotely cost-competitive with coal / natural gas / hydro / wind / solar? No, that’s not going to happen.  In the very unlikely event anyone is reading this in 2050: if there’s a commercial fusion reactor producing electricity whose socket cost is no more than three times that of coal, natgas, wind, solar or hydro, whichever is most expensive, I lose. I don’t expect to lose.

By the way, the world is currently getting about 30% of its total electricity from renewables — wind, solar, hydro, a bit of biomass. That’s up from about 18% around the turn of the century. (It’s up a lot more in absolute terms, because world electricity consumption has more than doubled in the last 25 years.) By 2050 that’s expected to be well over 40%.

Whoops, some techno-optimism slipping in there… anyway, point being it’s not clear how much of an incentive there will actually be to commercialize fusion, because we’ll probably be able to go largely carbon-free without it.

4) There will be no superconductor revolution. Superconductors are amazing, and they let you do a lot of neat stuff.  But so far they only work at very low temperatures or very high pressures.

[works great as long as you keep pouring the liquid nitrogen]

So STP (Standard Temperature and Pressure) superconductors are kind of a holy grail of materials science.  People have been working on them for decades now.  Will we see a STP superconductor in the next decade?  I would be surprised but not shocked.

But even if we develop a material that superconducts at standard temperature and pressure, it probably won’t be that big a deal.   Science nerds tend to get excited about superconductors for one set of reasons, tech bros for another. But both those groups are kind of excitable, you know?  A plausible STP superconductor would be nice, but neither revolutionary nor transformative.

Imagine that starting tomorrow we had a superconducting material with a cost and physical properties similar to zinc.  Meaning, soft but not very malleable or ductile; rather brittle; low-ish melting point; not very reactive.  (Nothing special about zinc, to be clear.  This is a thought experiment.)  And let’s further say it’s no more expensive than silver (around a dollar a gram, give or take) and can be produced at scale.  Most of the currently plausible recipes for STPSCs involve weird alloys and very complicated recipes, so those are actually pretty optimistic assumptions, but let’s be generous.

Okay then, would it be useful? Sure, all sorts of ways. Would it transform our lives, or indeed any particular industrial sector? No, not at all. Zinc doesn’t work very well for long-distance power lines (not very ductile, too brittle), and anyway it would be too expensive.

We’d have cheaper MRIs, sure. And much cheaper particle accelerators.  Maglev trains become more competitive, though they’d still be a niche application.  Fiercely strong magnets becomee widely available, which is nice.  So, various incremental improvements.  But a revolution?  Not even close.

“Well what about a superconductor that /is/ malleable and ductile, and not brittle, and easily cast or worked? And also very cheap and easy to produce, not requiring any ingredients that are very rare or difficult to handle? And also very chemically stable and not reactive or flammable or explosive or toxic?  What then?” Well I feel there should be a pony in there somewhere, you know?  That’s a long list, and there’s no reason whatsoever to think a hypothetical STPSC would tick all those boxes.  It almost certainly won’t.

(I know where this stuff comes from, unfortunately. There were science fiction stories in the 1970s where STP superconductors that were as cheap and convenient as plastic wrap were a key plot point. In reality, “cost like silver, properties like zinc” is setting the bar very low. At least zinc is a metal, easy to work and handle, and not particularly flammable, toxic, or radioactive.)

5) There will be no useful new physics. No anti-gravity, telepathy, faster-than-light communication or travel, time-travel, teleportation booths, force fields, manipulation of the strong or weak nuclear forces, or reactionless drives.  We’re not going to get energy from the vacuum, or perpetual motion, or glowing blue cubes. 


[well, darn]

More to the point, by 2050 we will not have any plausible prospect of any of these things.  Like, in 1940 nuclear fission was new physics, and nuclear energy was a distant dream.  But people could (and did) claim with a straight face that we would have commercial atomic power within 20 years — and we did! 

But there’s nothing like that with new physics today, and there won’t be in 2050 either.

I’m getting very slightly out over my skis on this one, because in theory new physics could surprise us. But 1) we haven’t had any serious, major new physics for a while now — between 20 and 50 years, depending on your definition;  and  2) the new physics that we have had?  has been interesting but not particularly useful;  and  3) almost all the places we’re currently looking for new physics are places where practical applications are extremely unlikely.

I mean, I personally really want to know what dark matter is, whether gravity can be quantized, whether the Koide formula really means anything, and what the deal is with neutrinos. (Seriously, what is the deal with neutrinos.)  But that information almost certainly won’t have any practical use whatsoever.


[seriously, what is the deal with neutrinos]

So while this prediction isn’t absolutely airtight, I’d be comfortable betting money on it.

Coming at it from another direction: we’ve been looking at the universe really hard now, at scales large and small, with increasingly sensitive instruments, for over a century. So if there is new physics?   Its effects are very likely to be very weak, or to show up only at very large distances or very high energies. So, potentially very interesting, but not likely to be useful.

6) Airships.  Zeppelins and dirigibles, yeah?  People have been trying to make airships work for a very long time now.  The first prototype airship flew in 1854 — that’s not a typo, it was unmanned and steam-powered — and large airships date back to the 1880s. 


[1930s New York, and yes it must have been a hell of a view]

Unfortunately airships are fragile, labor-intensive, and vulnerable to bad weather.  They require a lot of room, a fair amount of specialized infrastructure, and — this is the kicker — they’re actually less efficient than other forms of transportation. They’re much slower than airplanes, yet much more expensive than trains or trucks.  And no amount of technological innovation has been able to budge those stubborn facts.

There was a vogue a while back for “airships will be useful in places where there aren’t roads! Like ummm Africa!” Except Africa has roads. They’re not always in great shape, but they exist. The Congo has roads. Labrador has roads. Antarctica has roads.  People want to go to a place? Before long, there’s a road.

(At this point someone usually mentions Sergey Brin’s Pathfinder. Billionaire’s toy, and if they have a business plan that makes any sense they’re keeping it well confidential.)

Airships look cool as hell, so people will keep trying. But in over 100 years, they haven’t broken out of a few niche uses. It’s not going to happen in the next 25 years.  Honestly, I don’t think it will happen ever.

Well then!  Let’s check back in 2050, and we can see if I was right.